...It seems as if the insistence of CW ops to have the ability to listen to themselves "realtime" is just a crutch and excuse to malign current SDR tech.

Use a keyer and get along, or get left behind.

I haven't used an SDR, but based on what I'm reading, I'd guess that the QSK isn't that great because of the latency. For me, excellent QSK at mid to high speeds is something I love about CW and wouldn't want to sacrifice. It's not so much listening to ourselves "realtime," but being able to hear the band "realtime" between code elements.

I'm not worried about being "left behind." HF radio is old news all together, we've all been "left behind" already.

I don't think there are any modern radios out there in the past 20 years that do not have a CW side tone monitor. I have a 6700 and use an external keyer for contesting purposes but any radio that supports CW should have a usable side tone monitor available and QSK capability. I understand from the Insider reports that there has been much focus on QSK and CW in general that I hope will be in the Ver. 1.0 release.

I don't think there are any modern radios out there in the past 20 years that do not have a CW side tone monitor. I have a 6700 and use an external keyer for contesting purposes but any radio that supports CW should have a usable side tone monitor available and QSK capability. I understand from the Insider reports that there has been much focus on QSK and CW in general that I hope will be in the Ver. 1.0 release.

73GregAB7R

Good point. I would say that QSK is purely a contest requirement and has no bearing on day to day typical amateur radio use as a whole. The solution is that those who plan to contest seek something besides an SDR, since at this juncture and for the foreseeable future, DSP based rigs simply will NOT be capable of delivering true QSK. Someday, maybe, but for now, the SDR is the realm of phone, digi, SSTV, and casual CW users. That's just the way it is, and no amount of harping will fix that. The only solution is a DSP platform that has no latency.

We don't have that capability now. We won't have that capability within the next 10 years. We won't have that capability until digital signal processing makes some leap of performance that is, at this time, inconceivable.

I don't think there are any modern radios out there in the past 20 years that do not have a CW side tone monitor. I have a 6700 and use an external keyer for contesting purposes but any radio that supports CW should have a usable side tone monitor available and QSK capability. I understand from the Insider reports that there has been much focus on QSK and CW in general that I hope will be in the Ver. 1.0 release.

73GregAB7R

Good point. I would say that QSK is purely a contest requirement and has no bearing on day to day typical amateur radio use as a whole. The solution is that those who plan to contest seek something besides an SDR, since at this juncture and for the foreseeable future, DSP based rigs simply will NOT be capable of delivering true QSK. Someday, maybe, but for now, the SDR is the realm of phone, digi, SSTV, and casual CW users. That's just the way it is, and no amount of harping will fix that. The only solution is a DSP platform that has no latency.

We don't have that capability now. We won't have that capability within the next 10 years. We won't have that capability until digital signal processing makes some leap of performance that is, at this time, inconceivable.

I'm guessing you're not a high speed CW op, then. QSK is not "purely a contest requirement."

If you're not contesting or in some sort of CW traffic net, then why do you need to hear in between your characters? [...]

When I am responding to a CQ, or calling CQ, QSK allows me to stop sending as soon as I hear another station -- that helps me avoid me becoming QRM. Also, when I am in a QSO, I can hear someone wanting to break in or comment and turn it over. (I assume phone ops. use VOX for some of the same reasons.)

The only time I go to semi-breakin operation is when the QRN is so high that I cannot hear my sidetone -- and that is very rare.

QSK is essential for me; every radio I have, from my Rockmite to my K3, has it.

[quote or=AB7R link=topic=91646.msg702581#msg702581 date=1380045041]We don't have that capability now. We won't have that capability within the next 10 years. We won't have that capability until digital signal processing makes some leap of performance that is, at this time, inconceivable. [/quote]Disagree, we can do this today, its just that we don't because the SDR scene is wedded to general purpose operating systems on commodity hardware and often has a poorly thought out keying input.

Lets say 10ms is a reasonable latency, and that getting to and from an I/Q pair at a reasonable symbol rate takes 2 of those ms (Probably realistic for the CIC and decimator/interpolator chains to do their thing).

Lets say we are getting an I/Q sample every 10us (100KHz I/Q sample rate), and that we are doing the work in a DSP interrupt handler on a core closely coupled to the FPGA fabric (Cyclone 5 for example can have a dual core hard IP arm on the die) or at least on the same board.

Now we are processing a sample every 10us, and ignoring filter latencies can turn it around in 1.01ms aerial to audio dac or vice versa. This leaves the filtering, which is surely going to be some kind of FIR/IIR mix, and if we switch to low latency mode is NOT going to be linear phase (For the same reason narrow crystal filters are not usually linear phase, causality makes the group delay excessive), filter delay is a fact of life in either analogue or digital filters, and the only reason we notice it more in digital is because we choose to optimize for other things (Constant group delay being the big one).

Note that 10ms is almost certainly faster then any rig not using diode switches can go from rx to tx without risking hot switching at least one relay, and is only slightly longer then the rise time of a well behaved keying envelope.

Which is why I mentioned closely coupling a processor to the gate array.

Actually, 8ms would be shockingly poor for a uncontended local link, with preemption on in the kernel and tuned interrupt processing priorities, I am seeing network latencies in the 400us region (And could probably do better).

Still best to hook the processor directly to the gate array fabric, but networking is not a show stopper.

Not surely a reasonable thing to do if carting a reasonable chunk of spectrum around as an I/Q sample stream.

I have found that some so called gig-e cards have really shonky drivers that cannot keep up if you come even close to saturating the link, so you have to be a little picky wrt hardware if you want things to work well, but it was ever thus.

If hams understood 802.11 they would see this would be the very LAST choice to operate a thick client SDR on. Most network testing and metrics are done using wired networks, Wi-Fi is just too painful and unreliable to make any meaningful decision. In addition, Wi-Fi was intended for MOBILE use never intended for applications continuously streaming large volumes of IQ data.

As one who started with a 40's vintage Hallicrafters receiver back in the 60's, I enjoy the "feel" of a nicely balanced dial to navigate the air waves. If the above interface will work, it would be pretty simple to build my own control panel.

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